Welcome!

Welcome to the Annotated Mountain Goats!

The objective of this website is to provide a comprehensive, referenced source
for information about the lyrics of the Mountain Goats. John's
commentaries and details about obscure references can all be found inside. If
you'd like to contribute, please let me know! I'd love to hear from you and if
I've gotten something wrong, or you have more information, send it in.

Many of the references are from comments John has made at live shows. If these
are reported, it's always from a recording so it can be verified. All of these
are available online, in the forums, or elsewhere. If you can't find the
source and you'd like to confirm a quote, feel free to shoot us a line. Keep
in mind that, as in my live show directory, the only quotes that are included
here are those that I can find so that I can verify them.

Many references and excellent banter are left unannotated. The goal of this
website is to help discover and understand the Mountain Goats as opposed to
revealing every gem. Listening to live shows and banter yourself will continue
to yield moments which cannot be had otherwise. Many particularly amazing
descriptions are summarized rather than quoted, and a great deal of banter not
pertaining to explaining a song are left for the listener to discover. John
himself has said with some frequency that he doesn't believe in parsing every
detail — that the meanings of songs change and should be
interpreted by the listeners. That said, I love hearing what he thinks about
his music, hence this website. So, please be careful with overanalyzing and
avoid dogma as you use these annotations.

Singles

Splits

Collaboration records are put in the albums, EPs, or singles categories as
appropriate, as given the nature of the Mountain Goats it feels artificial to
me to distinguish between the nebulous nature of the regular band at times and
a formal collaboration. True splits are listed below, along with true
collaborations with bands outside the traditional Mountain Goats canon.
Collaborations John makes with other bands released under their names are
annotated on the miscellaneous collaborations page.

Bonus media

Media released in association with an album, generally containing demos,
extras, or outtakes. For a complete list of such tracks, see the series
page. Extras without bonus media are annoted with the
album in question.

Title

Year

Format

Associated album

Blood Capsules b/w Dub Capsules

2015

12" 45 rpm

Beat the Champ

Steal Smoked Fish b/w In the Shadow of the Western Hills

2012

7"

Transcendental Youth

All Survivors Pack

2011

cassette

All Eternals Deck

The Life of the World in Flux

2009

CD

The Life of the World to Come

Come, Come to the Sunset Tree

2005

LP

The Sunset Tree

Online releases

Albums or songs whose primary medium of release was an online studio, boombox,
or demo recording. For Songs for Vamsidasa Babaji, see Heretic
Pride.

John has occasionally released material under other names, such as the
Comedians (an early name for collaborations between Darnielle and
Vanderslice), Yamaraja Racers (a cover band for himself), and others. These
are documented as if they were released as Mountain Goats titles, since other
than the name they are indistinguishable from Mountain Goats material.

Credits

First, thank you, John Darnielle, for making music that has inspired and moved
me so much, over and over again. Words cannot describe what your music means
to me. Thank you.

I owe a huge thanks to one man in particular: Christopher MacMurray, often
known as Caliclimber, who I became friends with at a show and who has
encouraged my love of the Mountain Goats in every way possible. He's also
produced several truly remarkable Flickr albums, which detail almost every
piece of Mountain Goats cover art, related cover art, posters, and
Extra Glenns and Lens cover art, from which I and others have
cribbed heavily. Thank you for everything, Cali, you are the best.

I also would like to thank Jon Nall for
producing his remarkable website, for being the Mountain Goats archivist, for
unknowingly exposing me and so many others to information about so much great
music, and for inspiring this website. Thanks for paving the way.

Many people have offered information, discussion, feedback, criticism, advice,
corrections, and rare praise regarding the contents of this site. Particularly
I would like to thank the denizens of the Mountain Goats forums for
much discussion and analysis helping me to find more information, the
Mountain Goats subreddit for similar reasons, and commenters on many
websites (particularly on Songmeanings) for helping me track down obscure
references. Of these people, three in particular stand out: Thomas Fidler, also
known as Drumhax, Patrick Lickman, also known as echo, who
spontaneously drafted entire pages about albums and spurred me to write more,
and Stephen Plummer, a frequent chatter on #themountaingoats, whose
impeccable memory and knowledge of live material corrected many errors in the
live show directory.

Lastly, thank you to all fans of this amazing band for being an extraordinary
community and for supporting excellent independent music.

The Annotated Mountain Goats in the media

To my utter shock, occasionally this website has been mentioned in print: